Chapter VI: Part II: In London (3)

On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord ----." Before lunch we sat in his little room and talked about ----, but I was still quite unable to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that here was I lunching with Lord ----'s son, on equal terms, with mutual interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ----shire and I saw Auntie C---- serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not at all inclined to be a snob.

He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool--to absorb the nicotine--a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told me to throw the cigarette away and have another.

By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin, excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why the _wrong_ end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord ----'s son and heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.

"That didn't burn very well, did it?"

I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ---- drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me, and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks which I could not catch.

I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie, stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.

"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed, and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....

During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got home late without a latch-key)--it was because he called her "Cook" instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs. A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance. She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and he smiled down on the little weakness _de haute en bas_.

* * * * *

I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after all. He may be a bore--particularly if he sits with his finger tips apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps on relating _in extenso_ how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles. Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the man who has come down in the world--the fool, the drunkard, the embezzler--he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or (better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It must be very dull to remain stationary--once a peer always a peer.

_April_ 20.

Miss ---- heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness. Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly--honest then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.

Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for the latrine: picture puzzles.

_April_ 23.

_A Foolish Bird_

With a menacing politeness, B---- to-day inquired of a fat curate who was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,--

"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"

The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B----, mistaking a bomb for an egg.

"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.

B---- repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch brogue.

"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."

"I don't think you will," said B----.

"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.

"This," B---- grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow almost slid on to the floor.

A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are "Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies--the _Pirates of Penzance_ having become part of the national Consciousness.

_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette_

R---- remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting Chloe's cigarette.

"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your hand--by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to last over a period for as long as possible."

"Chloe," replied R----, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"

"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I said to R----, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell them you _know_."

* * * * *

Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!

_May_ 2.

Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that anxiety changes into recklessness--you simply don't care. The aperients are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere, from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it could stop or go on--I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her. I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical indifference waiting to be struck down.

... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after all.

_May_ 3.

Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend's hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.

It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel.

_May_ 10.

In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast capacities for envy--I wish I could fly.

_May_ 24.

In L---- with my brother, A----. The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N----. He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.

We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out--and with malice--weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders--to see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our love is unassailable--it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.

N---- is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!

_May_ 31.

R---- outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years and at one time a flask of brandy.

_June_ 3.

Went to see the Irish Players in _The Playboy_. Sitting in front of me was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice that crepitated rather than spoke.

She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation--like an enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!

After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a physical impossibility for me to check a smile--and oh! Heavens!--she gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked again to see if I was still smiling--I was--and we then smiled broadly and openly on one another--her smile being the timorous ingénue's not the glad eye of a _femme de joie_. Later, on the railway platform whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod--ah! dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.

Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at them.

_June_ 4.

Rushed off to tell R---- about my little Irish girl. Her face has been "shadowing" me all day.

_June_ 6.

A violent argument with R---- _re_ marriage. He says Love means appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend passion--just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny--an old crock as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man--a mummy rather. I told him so amid much laughter.

"You're a reactionary," says he.

"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"

_June_ 7.

My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the one I defended yesterday against R----. In fact, I actually subverted to my own pressing requirements some of R----'s own arguments! The argument, of course, was with Her.

Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss ---- said I was a funk--to me who the day before had been hammering into R---- my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.

"Yes, I _am_ afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally, "when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry. As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion, I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."

All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.

... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.

_June_ 9.

Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.

_June_ 10

_Lupus_

It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth--after every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June!

_June_ 15.

_Measuring Lice_

Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of decimals!

To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner of life suits my incurable frivolousness.

I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: _e.g._, a book on the quadrature of the circle, the _gabbertushed fustilugs_ passage in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr. Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning.

Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.

_June_ 17.

Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me. _George_, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says _non so che_ for _je ne sais quoi_.

_June_ 26.

... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.

"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled on--disposed to be very playful.

At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,--

"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."

I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of tremors. I said after a pause,--

"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."

No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.

"Good-bye," I repeated.

She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the door--very upset.

"_Au revoir_."

No answer.

"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all and I'm not sorry.

In the passage met Miss ----. "What?" she said, "going already?"

"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left her wondering.

_June_ 29.

_At the Albert Hall_

Went with R---- to the Albert Hall to the _Empress of Ireland_ Memorial Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin's Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.

This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity--a very fine sensation for a London Sparrow....

I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health. Surely, even a single exposure to--say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony--must result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro' him.

If one could _develop_ a human soul like a negative the effect I should say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do--seriously: divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.

The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A feeling of immeasurable well being--a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to shake hands all round--happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end and never perhaps to meet again--never.

R---- and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!

"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert Memorial.

We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em all--God bless 'em--even old ----. R---- said it was nothing short of insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to the Concert.

Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to Rotten Row--I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful place the world is.

After separating from R---- very reluctantly--it was horrible to be left alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught myself avoiding the shadows of the trees--so as to be every moment out in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale, anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.

At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.

_June_ 30.

_Dinosaurs_

There are books which are Dinosaurs--Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of the World_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. There are men who are Dinosaurs--Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon, Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning, Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I would return to Nature--I could almost return to Chaos. There are times when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.[1]

(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go back to top hats and civilisation.)

_July_ 8.

_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_

The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically--at morning and evening. This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset--however work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine--our natural impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we are too occupied or asleep--but sunrise is the great hour of the departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a mysterious appearance--to-night the tops of the elms seemed super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had arrived for immediate departure.

_July_ 14.

Have finished my essay. But am written out--obviously. To-night I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word.

_July_ 19.

For a walk with R---- in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's house at ----. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ----, a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping out (as R---- said) like two white mice one after the other as she moved across the lawn.

Coming home I said to R---- histrionically, "Some golden-haired little boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful picture--would that I were the father to make that group a _fait accompli._" R----, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as "that elegant virgin."

_July_ 25.

While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R---- heard a whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.

"Come down," he cried.

She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye," without so much as an exchange of names.

"Even if she _were_ a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious water-colour painting."

"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.

"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't introduce her to that abominable ----. He is abominably handsome, and I hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome--parentage, money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."

R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a _passion_ did not exist."

"Have you none?"

"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.

"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you," I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish, '_That_ is a woman's heart.'"

R---- exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of Dostoieffsky's _The Possessed_ for a Balaclava Charge."

"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment. "You see, I belong to the raw meat school. _You_ prefer life cooked for you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the wheat with your own scythe."

_July_ 26.

The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off your nose with a big pair of scissors."

_July_ 27.

To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this morning, I exclaimed,--

"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet. Turtle Soup ain't in it."

She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--

"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones (Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."

Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."

"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in succession inquired,--

"What's become of all the gold?"

"What's become of Waring?"

"What shall I sing when all is sung?"

To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but presently in the usual voice,--

"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want it, cannot find it."

"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"

_August_ 1.

All Europe is mobilising.

_August_ 2.

Will England join in?

_August_ 12.

We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The tension makes me feel physically sick.

_August_ 21--_August_ 24.

In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly came over to see me.

_September_ 25.

[Living now in rooms alone.]

I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a glass or so of Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?" as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so encourages me.

_September_ 26.

Doctor's Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose. M---- wrote me the other day,--

"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find something we can patch."

He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye, old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopœia.

My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived. That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing more than a shadowy _locum tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment.

At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.

One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....

There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies.... It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two houses in London--the Doctor's and R----'s Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy. Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms, with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman to _love_. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.

"There's a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.

I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination service in my present state of mind.

_October_ 7.

To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."

_October_ 11.

Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they were tears of remorse....

On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.

Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star."

But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith. Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the consolation of genius.

_October_ 12.

Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at times like these when--God love us all--there is a column of casualties each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow. Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!

_October_ 13.

Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking to some one, to be among human beings.

Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there, and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but I go very seldom. Pride again.

I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness! Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching forth both hands and to me....

Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one, I might have known I was in for trouble.

_October_ 14.

_Marie Bashkirtseff_

Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.

This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.

_October_ 15.

A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face? He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.

As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me! I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in the night forces the back door!

* * * * *

To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in my manner of speech and opinions.

Now R---- has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody assumes that I am his tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose, is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice.

"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R----'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it.

"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled complacently.

"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!--my God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.

_Resignation_

In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced, grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War. Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war?

_October_ 21.

I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."

R.: "I hate it."

I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply delicious."

R.: "I never lick stamps--it's dangerous--microbes."

I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with them."

R.: "Yes, you'll need to."

(Laughter.)

Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,--

"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really begins--what?"

_October_ 23.

I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."

I cleared my throat and began,--

"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own infinite mutual amusement.

The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.

_October_ 24.

Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St. Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.

Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.

In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.

In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature--one brochure entitled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on this stall _lent_ for 1d." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--

"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."

Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's _The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.

In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling _L'Indépendance Belge_ or pamphlets entitled, _Why We Went to War_.

In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.

Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....

Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel Butler), _North American Review_ (one on Henry James) and dined at seven. After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster_, and the _New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.

_October_ 25.

_Too Late_